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Time to clear the joint

Sort of. The landscaping around my house has suffered from inattention, also known as freaking overgrown and butt ugly. Bad enough that someone complained to the Homeowners Associations who sent me a letter explain the rules. I’m not mad at them. It is butt ugly and truth is truth. The remedy is I fix it or they fix it and send me the bill. For while I was tempted to let them fix it, just to see what they would do with the place I call Juniper Hell (#1 and #2 — two hells). But, after thinking a little more — it’s an opportunity to get rid of a bunch of crap I was never that happy with and put something that doesn’t offend me or anybody else. This opportunity has a deadline, however: 15 days.

I’m guessing 15 days is probably a matter of discretion because Landscapers don’t work that that fast. I really did save a flyer left on my doorstep a few months ago because it focused on the kinds of things I might want done. I set up an appointment (4 days in the future, so the clock counts down fast). The fall back plan was to get a dumpster delivered, buy a chain saw and get to work.

I also thought I should show a good faith signal that the message was received and I’m on it. so I cut down a couple of overgrown mugo pines. You can’t shape mugo’s that grow too big and mine were tall and scrawny. Down, they go. I cut back the Snowball Viburnum at the one time of the year to admire it ( it snowball flower time). I removed some dead branches on the Japanese Maple and I attacked a few barberries. Not to fix anything, but to show that I was working on it. If I was a vindictive person, I could look in my files to find out which landscaper did the original work and recommended the viburnum and barberries but the facts are I own it. She did recommend the Junipers and I agreed. I blame 80′s music for making me stupid. The Grey Gleems? High margin sale for her. Ugly monsters to maintain.

Still, I’ve got to own my problem and now is the time to fix some of the dumb choices of the past (plus I have a deadline). Gleems? Cut them down. Barberries? Rip them out. I hate them. Viburnum? Bye bye. Golden Spirea? Not my friend (never was). Tonight (5/14/2012) I met with the landscaper and he gave me a reasonable quote for removing damn near everything. Actually, it’s by the hour with his best estimate of the top end of the range. No doubt there will be cost overruns but there is the chance I can do some of the work before they get here Tuesday (5/22/2012)

With a few exceptions, it’s going to go to bare ground (with bark mulch of course) while I determine what would look better. That’s probably not what the HOA or complaintent(s) thought about because they don’t what Juniper hell #1 covers up.

Juniper hell.
I’ll post a picture of before and after, of course.

Juniper Hell #1 is 2 x 3 x 2 sprawling low growing (snort) junipers planted long ago to hide a 6′ X 10′ by 3′ high cement box with a steel lid on top. It’s not my cement box — it belongs to the canal company which is an informative tale about water rights, easements, ditch riders and rural canals. Some may think it is a creek or a stream flowing through the neighborhood. Nope. It’s a ditch or canal. They gave me permission to cover their access point with the Junipers if I was willing to remove them when needed if they ever needed to maintain the ditch – Hey, it could happen.

Yes, I am also willing to remove the junipers at the HOA request and I will do. The ditch company would just file a silent lien (god only their might one already, 20 years old) Be gone thee Junipers! Show thy Cement Box glory with its rusted iron top for all neighhboors to admire! Not my cement box. Not my problem. Yes, I’m a bit annoyed at the HOA take down even though they are correct. I’ll eventually plant something else there to hide it. Maybe a boxwood hedge row. Four or five years to grow to that point. No big deal.

The landscaper talked about pulling the junipers out with a chain attached to his pickup truck. Another picture opportunity!

Posted in Landscaping.

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By Cecil – May 14, 2012

I bid one penny more

You’ve seen the TV commercial, the girl in the black almost see through top, gold locks flowing as she shakes her head and hips at all the great deals if you go to their auction site, and all the bids are only one penny more.

Sounds and looks like a Cable TV BS Advertisement Yes it does sound like that and yes, It is BS. You can easily find out how it works for a bidder (purchaser) with a Google or youtube search. I suggest you do. Money upfront to join the site to buy something! No warning there, eh? Complaints of excessive shipping costs if you do win the item at auction and lots of complaints about how the auction count down clock restarts when a new bid arrives. Kind of like a slot machine that displays three Lucky 7′s and you can see the forth Lucky 7 roll down towards the pay line and then it backs up. Some sort of “reverse thrusters”, Mr Sulu effect. So the buyer who wants this object d`art bids a penny more and the clock resets and all wheels start spinning again. And the last wheel backs up once again. That’s the buyer side experience, I gather. Why does that odd behavior exist in bidding rules?

Now for the other side of those transactions and this is were it gets very interesting. I was getting my annual haircut and my barber was describing all the money he was going to make at Zeekrewards.com. $200/day, real soon now and all he had to do was enter some bids by 3:00PM CST (GMT -6). We talked about “two good to be true”, MLM and late night infomercials but my barber insisted it works. I asked if it was real money. Oh, yes he’s about to get his first check from his $1900 investment, 7 months more and it’s break-even time and pure profit from then on, but he might sign up for the next level because the profit is even up there. He asked me to look into it and tell him if it’s scam.

So I did investigate and it is quite a delightful scam on bidders and team members both. First off, they don’t talk in dollars. The currency inside the MLM team is bids. They pay a monthly fee depending on their membership level and they get bids in return. If they use those bids (increase the price to the buyer in the auction), they get ‘credit’ for being a good team member. After a few months any unused bids in the members account expire and their exercised bids are converted into money via a pro rated share in a pool of profits that the company determines and returns to the MLM team members.

I’m not a forensic accountant but I know when one is needed. I know why I don’t want to be involved if one is needed.

By inventing their own currency (The Bid) that both buyer and seller have to pay real money for they control the value of the ‘bid’ with their arcane MLM rules. As long as they grow both the number of members and the member’s fees with upselling (buy more bids with Gold Membership), the easier it is to screw the auction buyers.

The 3:00PM cut off? On the internet, with enough ‘paid’ bidders, it’s before 3:00 PM, everywhere and anytime. At 3:01, some Team members will be bidding up the auction price for the next day. I’ll bet there is a rule that MLM members can’t (or shouldn’t) bid on the same item more than once a day (otherwise they could end up with an unwanted item and it’s shipping and handling fees).

I’m not saying I have all the details correct. I will say that I’ve got them correct enough. The only people making money are the ones that invented it or got in early. Now I have to call my barber and explain this because I like the guy and I really don’t like scams.

Posted in Misc.

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By Cecil – May 13, 2012

Trying out Haiku

The operating system Haiku, the open source version of BeOS. At the moment I’m running off of the LiveCD and it’s pretty snappy performance. For some reason it wouldn’t boot from my USB memory stick but that might be a setting in my bios.

It is a different OS so it take a while to understand where things are like setting and what the app names mean. The web browser is named WebPositive for example. No harder to learn than Android.

Interesting is that cut and paste are alt-c and alt-v (one small keymap to get my that Apple Fan key mapped. If that works for the terminal app that would be lovely. More Mac like.

It appears that there is enough of a posix system that many apps can be ported. I might install this on a spare partition and fix the grub file to point to it after I get the boot from USB figured out.

[hours later]
The love is not flowing. The Bios hangs when booting from that USB stick. I don’t know if it’s Bios or the image on the stick.

Ubuntu knows its a Be OS file system on the stick. It even reads it. So, Ubuntu can reformat that spare partion on the hard drive to befs so I can install from the CD, Right? Hmmn. Not really. If it did then grub hoops to jump through seem to be too high.

[Later]
I had to do some gpartd fun. I had to blow off that spare partition #4 and turn it into a Extended partition. That’s OK, there was 75GB unused without an extended partition. I made a logical partition of 20GB under that, I called it ‘mybeos’ for the partition label and formatted as FAT32. Apply changes – you have to look for that option in gpartd or GParted

Rebooted in Ubuntu to make sure everything was working. Then I rebooted off the Haiku CD and installed it and picked that new logical partition to install in. Then I rebooted into Grub – Ubuntu still works.

I edited the the grub files as suggested. Reboot and Haiku is in the Grub menu (yay) and it works. You wouldn’t see this if it didn’t work. Nits? oh yeah! It also works. And it’s noticably faster than Linux.

Posted in Linux.

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By Cecil – April 30, 2012

Been long so long

Here’s the thing you need to know about Apple (AAPL) as an investment:

Traders get slaughtered. Play with gold you want to go mano-a-mano zero sum.

Yes, I’m still looking for the exit on the wall of worry. There is no such thing as a buy-and-hold forever tech stock (or any other stock or index or basket). The sell off in the last few weeks was trader action, as well as the stunning rebound, Wednesday. The analyst mistakes are being white washed as T and VZ showed lower new subscribers so they missed the international growth. No doubt they did but I suspect they missed something even more important: Sales into businesses and T and VZ maybe undercounting if there was a new phone or tablet activated on a business account. You’d have to do a deep dive in murky data to discover if I’m right or wrong

AAPL doesn’t target biz folks like MSFT or RIMM do so analysts think AAPL is a consumer/media (itunes/gadget) company. What if the biz folks are waking up from Mister Softy Slumber and discovering a world where the Apple Tax is less expensive than the Microsoft tax? (not by much, but big biz people and governments are notorious for jumping on the right trend train late and hitting the rails after the train pulled out. )

Apple doesn’t even have to target biz or directly attack Windows/MSFT. Stealth growth that Wall Street Analysts would never think of or for a media company. Make you own investment decisions, please! I think there is a lot of growth ahead before the serfs rebel against the Apple Tax and ecosystem and they have a shit load of cash to distribute to shareholders as they rake it in even more.

At some time in the future, it too will fail to own the world. Sell the stock then and accept the wild and bumpy ride.

Posted in Investing.

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By Cecil – April 26, 2012

Clean out the trunk of old habits

See [Update]

Once again, I ponder what to do with my websites. The SEO spammers call it my BRAND. Like I care about that crap. You know, Facebook for all it’s warts, winkles and annoyances, works OK for casual stuff. Comments to friends and posting a link to a website with a comment. Facebook sucks/fails/screwsup/did-i-mention-fails for a long post or comments of substance. It’s the Microsoft of the Internet. Mostly works, mostly doesn’t suck.

A blog (aka this one or my cooking.mvmanila.com one) is the place for long stories and comments but I pay for them in dollars and time and I don’t really care that much anymore. The stories were told long ago and now one cares about the old stories. I’ve seen the stats, no one cares (except the spambots and SEO folk). That’s OK. I no longer care!. I haven’t looked up one of my posted recipes in years. It was a good idea at the time, but time has moved on and I haven’t. It’s also very clear in the stats that the only thing people care about are very narrow, focused rants or solutions to technical IT problems. Nobody cares about my vacation pictures or narrative from 2001 anymore. My vanity is vanishing.

I can consolidate the old junk at werehosed.wordpress.com for free and I don’t care that much if it dies a slow death. I don’t need the duplicate background scripts of the craptastic Perfect Market Timing System 1.3. Time to move on. Moving all that crap will take some time because it’s crap so who cares except I might want to do it correctly.

I’m not sure what werehosed.wordpress.com will be other than an archive but anything new will be there.

So Long and Thanks for all the fish.

UPDATE

We’ll that didn’t go so well. Declare Victory, then aim and shoot foot. I’ve done that before and I’ve done it again. Ignore all the crap above. None of my websites are moving to wordpress.com. It doesn’t like my flash videos of Cooking Cheap (the TV show). I could upgrade for a price that is slightly lower than Dreamhost but not by enough to switch.

Sorry. False Alarm. werehosed.mvmanila.com is still my home site. Now I have to delete the mess at the wordpress.com site. I chose badly.

Posted in Misc.

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By Cecil – April 22, 2012

A Lump of coal for me

Not a lot of dollars but the % loss was ghastly on my BTU investment – Mister Peabody’s coal train hauled it away.

I happen to believe that energy is a long term trend you can invest in. There’s not enough of it and the demand grows as brown, yellow and white people get a taste of it. Technology is same and kind of related.

However, there are lots of ways to play the energy theme and get it wrong. Energy is one that governments like to manage for their citizens happiness. They don’t care about your iPad happiness or Apple’s obscene profits or margins (compared to evil Big Oil).

I didn’t believe that the current political leadership would be so dumb as to kill coal in this country. Eventually, demagogues get the wake up call, right?

Still, Mister Peabody’s coal train left me behind. I probably sold at the bottom, in the bleakest of times and if I’d just waited it would get back to my purchase price, right?

No! Maybe 20 or 30 years from now, it might. Might not. I’ve had nat gas investments that sucked me down. And some that are starting to look brilliant, 15 years later. Let’s call it “got lucky” or “revert to the mean”. I don’t want to wait that long again and the mean value of buggy whips can only be discovered on A&E Storage Wars.

I’m still holding the AAPL and sweating. Too good to be true or a paradigm shift?

Posted in Investing.

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By Cecil – April 8, 2012

Crawling Upstream to Unity

I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10. I know it’s going to cause me trouble with the weird Unity UI. But, I’m an adaptable person and I don’t need a lot of UI customization. 11.04 Unity sucked but it was half usable, so I can go gnome 2 (classic) free. Word is that unity on 11.10 doesn’t have a sucky workplace manager. If I start to whine, remind me that I chose this path.

It’s got screen menubar that all the apps share, Mac like. OK. I used to be happy with that and whined about it when I switched from OSX. I could learn to be happy about that again. Sadly, you have to move the mouse to the top over your App Name to get the menus displayed. There’s probably a setting for that but I deal with that when the 11.10 upgrade is done (I’m still writing in 11.04 while the upgrade proceeds).

The 11.04 Unity Workplace is useless but I’m told it gets better.

—–2 hours later of download and virtualbox in and out configuring and one reboot —

Oh My! No I’m not going to whine (much) and I can’t go back. Alt-Tab is your new best friend. I can learn that.
Thank god I did the scrollbar-overlay trick long ago. It really doesn’t suck that much. Yes, the Workplace thingy needs a whole lotta help and the icons on the left hand side are too large and should be on the bottom and smaller. I know there are tweaks for that, should I care that much. I might but 12.04 is just around the corner so I’d rather not put in a lot attention. 11.10 Unity works. The Apps I want work. It doesn’t fit my memory patterns, but you know what? I can learn.

There are reasons to like the new interface. I like the font Ubuntu selected for me. Actually, now that I’ve used Unity with some knowledge, I kind of like it. I wish the row of app icons was on the bottom. Maybe there is a setting for that.

– a Day or two later –

I’ve run into all the whines about Unity. Some are very well deserved complaints. Install the Gnome-tweak app and you can almost get things better. Somehow, that added a new login option, Gnome Classic and Praise Jesus, It’s almost like home again. Workplaces work. Menus go back to what they used to be. There is no panel to put your launch icons so it’s not the same but its better.

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By Cecil – March 31, 2012

Cranky old man publishes letter to the editor

Well, not exactly. I did take the time to criticise an article at factcheck.org. Wisely, they don’t have a forum or comments section so you actually have find the right email address (not so easy) and write them an email – I know, that’s hard work. After some number of days or weeks pass, you’ll get a reply telling you that can’t debunk every wacko website (desmogblog.com was my first complaint) and they only debunk or fact check what politicians say in their advertisements and speeches. As you can imagine, that alone is a lot of BS to choose from and they were staying out the climate wars. Good for them. They should stay out of it.

Recently they published a debunking of a Santorum speech. He’s not my candidate. I dislike social conservatives of any religion that believe their imaginary being tells what we should do (atheists fall into the authority trap too). But, my point was that Factcheck.org had picked their authorities to follow and NAS and UN IPCC are not non-partisan authorities.

For what ever reason, the folks at Factcheck.org thought my email had some merit and they asked if they could publish it along with my name and city/state. I agreed if they would fix one typo.

And they did. Yes, they could have edited it more. They didn’t. They tossed in [spell out org name] in brackets which does make it more readable.

Posted in Misc.

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By Cecil – March 29, 2012

‘Bout do`se Paradigms

Paradigms. Those mythical shifting of memes into a new social fabric of consciousness. [I snark]

How does one tell Fad from BS. Which one will really be a paradigm shift or was a paradigm shift or a BS Fad?. Fads are easy enough to find in history, think fashion or popular music or TV. BS might be the idea that house prices always go up. We know now that one is BS. I grew up thinking that. A Mule and 40 acres, it’s yours for working hard. You can still find late night infomercials about how to profit from the “new real estate opportunities”

That’s not a paradigm that will shift in my or your life time. Owning and controlling a plot of land and a structure to house your family in seems to survive in spite of all the forms of government that have arisen to convince us that the Borg of the decade will take care of us. Deep down, we know the Borg won’t take care of us but we are still willing to carve out our special place in the hive.

Paradigm shifts occur when something new arrives. It might be new technology like PC’s or the internet or the printing press or steam engines or the emergence of Democracy that mostly works. Things just changed and they won’t go back to the good old days. Those are societal paradigm shifts. Doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. Things changed and it’s not going to go backwards. Hemlines can go up and down, celebrities go up and down and for certain politicians and their supplicants will go up and down. Those are Fads.

Investors need to understand the difference between Fads, BS and paradigm shifts. You’ll make more money on being right on the paradigm shift (e.g. Rockefeller and Oil). You’ll also lose the ranch when you bet against the paradigm shift by holding on to your buggy whips shares). Unless that was fad or bs.

Back when $AAPL was struggling with getting 10.2 almost working and iTunes was thought to be a wild gamble the record labels would never allow. I saw that there was something visionary. You would never have heard of it. Cyberdog. Compared to OLE, it was late to the document embedding party and it was serious buggy.

But, but, but Cyberdog knew about the internet and urls and uri. It did things back then that you take for granted now at any web site and they didn’t break the rules of the Internet to do it. That was back when MSFT was trying to squeeze the Netscape breathing tube. How did that work out Bill? Steve? Now $APPL is the largest company on the planet by market cap) and its not even bubbly over valued.

Fad or Paradigm shift?

There are other paradigm shifts occurring: Shale gas and oil: Fad, BS or shift? Collapse of the EU because of their socialist lite (or not so light policies) politboro? Fad, BS or investable paradigm shift? You decide.

[First time I've looked at the Apple Store for accessories]
Giggle, snort, Giggle. Over priced cables? That’s my Apple! Docking stations with Bluetooth keyboards and HDMI display ports. Tell me again why you need a Windows desktop PC .

Posted in Investing.

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By Cecil – March 9, 2012

Talking bout the Apple

One high flying momentum stock can make your paper profit portfolio look good. If only I had learned that lesson when SUNW soared into PEG land of 3 and 4 and the naz P/E was 74. That was the dot.com bubble. I failed to take profits.

Owning Apple ($AAPL) can make your portfolio look brilliant all the way to the next paradigm shift. For sure, it’s bigger than any of the evil oil companies and no one is hating on AAPL yet. Kind of like when MSFT could do no wrong back in those dot.com days.

I’m a geek technical fan boy, just like I was when SUNW ruled the pundit space. I loved their technology at the right time, price wise and I invested near the bottom.

Is the $AAPL p/e too high? No. Is the ‘growth’ part of peg mis-calulated? Don’t know. Knowing when to sell a momentum stock at the top is mystical knowledge. They don’t teach that at the buy and hold 401K employee seminars.

Posted in Investing.

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By Cecil – February 27, 2012